May: OhMyZsh and Gemini

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 12 May 2021

Topic 1/2: Competitive Programming—OhMyZSH

Speaker: Tim-Hinnerk Heuer

A short introduction to becoming effective with OhMyZSH with a focus on competitive programming with C++. This will be free-form, so contributions are welcome. I’ll show you how you can become effective with CP on websites such as HackerRank, LeetCode and CodeChef using nothing but the shell, Vim, and the websites. You’ll need to be very proficient with a programming language for competitive programming. I would recommend C++ and Python as the two languages of choice, but you can use a lot of languages such as JavaScript, Java, and many more.

Hopefully we can all learn something in this session and most importantly—have fun.

Topic 2/2: Gemini

Speaker: Giovanni Moretti

Gemini is a new internet protocol which:

– Is heavier than gopher
– Is lighter than the web
– Will not replace either
– Strives for maximum power to weight ratio
– Takes user privacy very seriously

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
Continue reading “May: OhMyZsh and Gemini”

March: rsync and Quasar

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 10 March 2021

Topic 1/2: rsync

Speaker: Tom Ryder

You’d think copying files between two different machines would be a relatively simple task, but it’s fraught with all sorts of subtlety and wastefulness. The rsync tool changed everything—fast, efficient, accurate file copies, right down to preserving file permissions, compressed transfer, and differential transfer—transferring only changed data. Tom will provide an introduction to command‐line rsync and a treatment of a couple of applications using it: the Grsync GUI, and the Dirvish backup system.

Topic 2/2: Quasar

Speaker: William Bell

William will demonstrate projects with the Quasar VueJS JavaScript
framework, and how to use it with Docker.

Continue reading “March: rsync and Quasar”

Networking help for member

Longtime member Palmerston North Linux Users Group John Eyres writes:

Hi, at [last week]’s meeting I asked if anyone could help with UPS and
networking for the guys I work with. They have muscular dystrophy, and can’t move/breathe on their own. The UPS works OK, but the batteries are getting old. Their cabinet is too small. … Please email me if you have any ideas. They do their own scripting, home
automation and development…

John includes some photos below. Please get in touch with him at computerjohney@gmail.com if you can help!

October: Password managers and AV1

Date
7pm, Wednesday 9 October 2019

PASSWORD MANAGERS

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Re-using the same passwords on multiple sites causes a lot of security problems, but humans aren’t good at remembering a large number of passwords. Part of a good solution is a secure password manager. Tom will demonstrate a few Linux-friendly options, including his own favourite, password-store.

AV1

Speaker: Nick Skarott

AV1 is another in a line of freely available patent free video codecs. But despite the fact other free codecs exist like VP9, adoption of this codec outside of YouTube is next-to-non existent. What makes AV1 different to the point that has streaming giants like Netflix and Twitch to all the big hardware vendors like Intel, AMD and Nvidia joining the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia)?

Continue reading “October: Password managers and AV1”

Thank you to Nick Skarott

The Palmerston North Linux Users Group would like to publicly thank outgoing President Nick Skarott for his efforts and contributions as President of the club for the past two to three years, during what would have been a shaky and uncertain part of the club’s history were it not for his dedication and effort.

It is because of Nick that we are still going strong as a club into 2018. We are all very grateful to him, and glad that he’s staying on to continue as part of our new committee. Thank you, Nick!

PLUG General Meeting 2018

The Palmerston North Linux Users Group held their General Meeting last night (the 13th of June 2018). The club’s constitution was confirmed with one minor amendment, and a new committee was elected:

  • John Flower: President
  • Nick Skarott: Vice President
  • Joseph Calkin: Treasurer
  • Tom Ryder: Secretary
  • Don Esslemont: Committee Member

Thank you to everyone who attended the meeting. The minutes are available for download here: PLUG GM 2018-06-13 Minutes.

Palmerston North Software Development Meetup

PLUG members with a software engineering bent may well be interested in this month’s Palmerston North Software Development Meetup on Thursday June 28th 2018 at 5:30pm at 114 The Square, Palmerston North.

From the announcement link above:

This month we are lucky enough to have Max Dietrich speaking to us about his experiences in building a Fly Buys micro-service platform.

Max was a developer on the Fly Buys redevelopment, moving the platform to a cloud-based micro-service architecture. The platform is based on Alchemy and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol frameworks. Alchemy is a framework for creating highly available systems that are built from micro-services. Alchemy includes service discovery, easy deployment, smart load balancing and is a polyglot, so you can use the best languages to solve all your problems.